For whatever reason, dear Rodney decided to start the Memorial Day recess week with a call to cut federal funding of Medicaid and other programs – read, Medicare.

The explanations are pretty standard: “[a]n unsustainable national debt of $20 trillion that’s going to be passed on to the next generation,” is, according to him, “cruel”.

He adds that “[i]t’s the same type of debt that was passed on to my generation by leaders in Washington.” I guess the trauma inflicted by that cruelty on Rodney, caused him to forget that he worked for, or was a member of the Washington elites most of his adult life, and that he is not really suffering as far as we can see. Unlike, say, those few hundreds of folks in Taylorville, his hometown, who earn below or somewhat above our official poverty line. They could, I bet, tell our Washington leader Rodney what real cruelty looks like. When, say, their representative in Congress votes for their healthcare to be curtailed, their nursing homes to be defunded, or food allowances for their kids cancelled.

Rodney is about equally dishonest and uneducated, and it is hard to say whether he is just lying or has no idea what he is talking about.

Or, in this case, whether he really said what is reported (UPDATED – see below). The quotes come from a slimy tentacle (Illinois News Network) of a right wing octopus (Illinois Policy Institute). The problem with the article, bylined by some Benjamin Yount, is that it also reports that “Veronique de Rugy, an economist at the Mercatus Center, said Davis is right.” De Rugy, according to the article, says that the status quo results in “…transferring massive amounts of wealth from the relatively young and poor Americans to the relatively old and sick ones”.

Well, de Rugy seems to be a real person, but the quote is fake (UPDATED – see below): it goes back to 2010, does not mention poor Rodney (who at the time was a striver in Rep. Shimkus’ office) at all and is heavily corrupted: in the original, she talks about transfers to “relatively old and wealthy”. (You might even think Veronique was presciently talking about Trumps’ budget proposal – but no, she is a known deficitophobe, and attributes all ills of the society to how reliable an investment the US Treasuries are, also known as the national debt, held by and large by the richest folks in the US. And, to Yount’s credit, de Rugy seems prone to repeat her line about wealth transfer over and over and over again.)

So, who knows whether this Benjamin Yount is telling the truth. As a free service to our Representative – a potential fake news alert for yea! check it out folks, and confirm or refute, please…

UPDATE: Ben Yount in an email confirmed quotes from both Rodney and de Rugy are from interviews he conducted. Well, good to hear that painting Rodney as a heartless ideologue falsely is not a right-wing plot to smear a politician, but a honest-to-God right-wing praise.

As for de Rugy, she wasreusing (as I mentioned), the line on wealth transfer many times over the years practically unchanged, – although here she seems to have prudently left the adjective out so it could be filled as political circumstances require. Well, this time is now: “wealth transfer” to the sick Medicaid enrollees be damned.

Speaking of misquotes. One extra service Rodney provides to the Party is to accumulate and magnify the faux pas of protesters, that are used then as fodder for the national right wing propaganda circuits.

But propaganda circuits are rarely staffed by good people, so they often fail to get the story right. Here’s an example, a bit of outrage from a conservative celebrity Michelle Malkin on Rodney’s behalf:

Well, we actually do know the story – not surprisingly: Rodney tends to roll out his wife seven days from Sunday as a proof that he cares, – and the gist of it is that Rodney’s wife was struggling in the US health care system (well before Obamacare), and got a correct diagnosis only with the help of a doctor trained in Canada. No quite the message Malkin tried to convey.

The doctor, if we choose to believe Rodney (should we?), decided on that occasion to badmouth his former colleagues and told the Davises that in Canada colon cancer is not treated until stage four. Which is patently false – were this the case, the colon cancer survival rates in Canada would be similar to those in Sudan, while they are pretty close to the US ones.

One way or other, Rodney repeating a lie or inventing it, it is always the same pattern. He clearly believes that his duty to the Party is to lie. Our duty to our district is to stop him.